PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release
April 12, 2025

CONTACT:
Dede Laugesen
info@PresentDangerChina.org

Inflection Point: Larry Fink Says “Nefarious Chinese Companies Should be Delisted” from U.S. Exchanges, Aligning with Trump’s “America First Investment Policy”

WASHINGTON, D.C.— On Friday, BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink seemingly broke with fellow Wall Street titans – and his own track-record – by declaring on Fox Business: “If the U.S. deems one of the Chinese companies is doing nefarious things, you know, against the United States, those companies should be delisted.” If he has, in fact, done so, Fink would effectively have endorsed the America First Investment Policy (AFIP) launched by President Donald Trump on February 21, 2025 which directs in part: “…[The U.S. Government] will establish new rules to stop United States companies and investors from investing in industries that advance the PRC’s national Military-Civil Fusion strategy [and use] all necessary legal instruments to further deter United States persons from investing in the PRC’s military-industrial sector.”

This apparent convergence builds on decades of work by President Reagan’s financial warfare expert, Roger Robinson, years of advocacy by the Committee on the Present Danger: China and the Coalition for a Prosperous America, the American Securities Association especially the sustained efforts of War Room’s Steve Bannon and Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo to end our underwriting the enemy.

President Trump’s laudably determined campaign to terminate the Chinese Communist Party’s predatory trade practices – and the CCP’s belligerent retaliatory actions – have put into sharp relief the fact that under its misrule, the PRC is, as the AFIP makes clear, a “foreign adversary” of the United States. In point of fact, the Chinese Communists make no secret of seeking our destruction and using “unrestricted warfare,” including financial life-support provided by Wall Street and scores of millions of mostly unwitting American retail investors’ funds, to realize that ambition.

A case in point is the planned underwriting by four top U.S. investment banks of a Pentagon-designated “Chinese military company operating in the United States” called CATL that is according to an important new analysis by the Prague Security Studies Institute: governed by CCP cells; significantly increasing the CCP’s threat to our naval forces; accused of exploiting slave labor; and linked to the Xinjiang Production and Construction, Co. blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments for running gulags in the PRC. In short, CATL would certainly qualify as a “nefarious” PRC enterprise.

Jamie Dimon’s J.P. Morgan, Brian Moynihan’s Bank of America, Ted Pick’s Morgan Stanley and David Solomon’s Goldman Sachs nonetheless hope to raise at least $7.7 billion – and possibly considerably more from American and other investors via a secondary placement in Hong Kong. Such underwriting is clearly inconsistent with U.S. government policy as pronounced in the America First Investment Policy.

The Bottom Line

It remains to be seen whether Larry Fink’s apparent abandonment of Wall Street’s China First investment policy will translate into removing from all of BlackRock’s investment products (in particular, its Exchange-Traded Funds) the securities of U.S.-blacklisted, “nefarious” Chinese companies. An early test would be his selling off the $1.13 billion worth of CATL A-Shares held by six of his corporation’s subsidiaries.

President Trump’s America First Investment Policy explicitly calls for using, among other tools “to further deter United States persons from investing in the PRC’s military-industrial sector…the imposition of sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) through the blocking of assets or through other actions.” The Committee on the Present Danger: China calls on Mr. Trump most immediately to exercise such powers to prevent the four U.S. investment banks from fundraising for CATL and otherwise foreclose the use of American entities’ assistance with Chinese IPOs – especially secondary listings in Hong Kong – as a means of circumventing and undermining U.S. policy pursuant to AFIP.

In addition, as Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary pointed out to Maria Bartiromo on April 11, 2025, incoming Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins must end Chinese Communist Party companies’ outrageous, and extremely perilous, privileged access to U.S. capital markets. To that end, Mr. Atkins must, as a first order of business in his new role, rescind the May 7, 2013 Memorandum of Understanding that enabled such CCP companies to ignore our laws and regulations designed to protect American investors, made possible with the active support of then-Vice President Joe Biden.

CONTACTS:  Dede Laugesen, info@PresentDangerChina.org_______
Read More at Committee on the Present Danger: China